Authors
Susan Reynolds1; 1 British Library, UK Discussion
The French Surrealist poet Robert Desnos (1900-1945) had never visited Czechoslovakia until, in April 1944, he arrived in Terezín.The previous year he had been arrested in Paris following the infiltration of the AGIR resistance network in which he had been active, preparing false papers for Jews and resistance workers in danger of capture.
Desnos was already weakened by months of captivity in other camps, and contracted typhus shortly afterwards. When Terezín was liberated by the Red Army and Czechoslovak partisans on 8 May, he was recognized by a young Czech medical student, Josef Stuna, who was familiar with French Surrealism. Despite his care, Desnos died on 8 June; Stuna returned his ashes and spectacles to Desnos's widow Youki.
>On 1 July 1945 the news of Desnos's death appeared in Svobodné Noviny, accompanied by a Czech translation of a poem which claimed to be his last. It resurfaced there in a tribute to the poet on 31 July, and in a French translation in Les Lettres françaises (11 August 1945).
>However, it was not realised that the poem was in fact the last stanza of one dating from 1926 (`J'ai tant rêvé de toi') until the Czech poet, Gallicist and translator Adolf Kroupa identified this in two articles in Les Lettres françaises (June 1960 and August 1970). The author examines this process within the context of the reception of modern French poetry in Czechoslovakia and the relationship between Czech and French Surrealism. 
